


Seeking Normal

by babiesstolemydingo



Category: Iron Man (Movieverse)
Genre: BDSM, F/M, h/c
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-30
Updated: 2010-08-30
Packaged: 2017-10-11 08:35:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/110443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/babiesstolemydingo/pseuds/babiesstolemydingo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony's tried for "normal," a couple of weeks after Afghanistan (whatever that means).  It goes...about as well as can be expected. Non-con breathplay, may be triggering.  I'm not even kidding, please heed the warnings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Tony

**Title:** Seeking Normal  
**Author:** babies stole my dingo (agilebrit)  
**Fandom:** Iron Man (movieverse)  
**Rating:** NC-17  
**Length:** Short story (about 2500 words)  
**Disclaimer:** Marvel owns, just playing, so not mine and no way am I making money from this.  
**Feedback:** Concrit adored! If you see something that can be improved upon, please let me know, even if it's only a typo.  
**Written for:** My own sadistic pleasure, if you can call it that--sparked by a discussion [here](http://community.livejournal.com/pressure_suit/767.html) that sent my brain spiraling out of control. pensive1, sunnyd_lite, and quite a few others on my flist and elsewhere aided and abetted me through it.  
**Warnings:** BDSM gone very very wrong. Non-con breathplay. May be triggering. Tony/OFC. Also, leave it to me to write an NC-17 fic wherein no actual sex actually occurs.  
**Summary:** Tony tries for normalcy again, two weeks after getting home from Afghanistan. It...doesn't work. At all.  


* * *

How.

How had I gotten here?

I'm not quite sure. I remember Jarvis telling me that a girl is at the door, and she's got a note from Obie saying "Here's a gift for you--hope you get back to normal soon." We have drinks. I think we have drinks. I wonder, later, if she put something in mine.

It's hazy after that; I take her to the bedroom, not the one I sleep in, the fun one. And she undresses, and she's all long legs and natural blonde hair and creamy smooth skin. I'm betting Obie told her about how much I like strap teddies and six-inch heels and garter belts and thigh-high black stockings with lace on top, because that's what she's got on under that little red dress she showed up in. She peels me out of my clothes and tells me to lie on my stomach so she can give me a massage. Her hands dig into the tense muscles of my back, working down and up and around until I feel like a particularly limp jellyfish and it's ohsogood, I'm almost asleep, haven't been this relaxed in ages...

The "snick" of the handcuffs around my wrists is nearly an afterthought, the Japanese silk rope around my ankles hasn't even registered until she rolls me onto my back and my hands are fastened to the headboard and my feet to the footboard. My breathing has suddenly accelerated and I'm not so relaxed anymore.

"Shh," she whispers against my throat. Her tongue flicks against my ear. "Obie wouldn't send someone you couldn't trust, right?" Two weeks after Afghanistan, and trust issues are still rearing their ugly heads. "What's your safeword, Tony?"

"Pepper," I say with no hesitation whatsoever, and my breathing calms just at the mention of her name.

"Isn't that interesting." It's not a question, and then the blindfold comes out, which is...okay. I'm okay with it. Really. Even when she pulls the pillow down to under my shoulders and my head tilts back to rest a little uncomfortably on the mattress. And she's massaging my chest and my arms and doing _things_ with her tongue that are new even to me and her hand is around my cock, but only for a teasing moment before she's rubbing my thighs and calves and then moving upwards again. Before I know it, the ball gag is in my mouth and suddenly it's not (quite) so okay anymore.

And it's involuntary, but my arms and legs are tugging against the restraints now, and my heartbeat has sped up. I can't breathe... "Shh," she says again. "I'm not going to hurt you, Tony. I promise." And I strive for normal, this used to be normal for me. But I'm tied down, gagged and blindfolded, and this is bringing back some bad memories. I'm not at all sure I want to go here, but she's right about Obie not sending someone I couldn't trust, I'd trust Obie with my life--

The flogger is both a pleasant and unpleasant shock. She's taking full advantage of the Fun Drawer, apparently. Hard enough to sting but not hurt, and she's straddling my hips and doing interesting things to other parts of me with other parts of her. And then the flogger comes down harder across my stomach and somewhere in there she found the vibrating nipple clamps and her pelvic bones are grinding into me and it's gone from almost-pleasure to not-quite-pain. I used to get hard from this. Why am I not hard now?

Her weight disappears, and the next thing I feel is the tip of a crop caressing my face and my throat. I swallow, and the impact of the crop on my chest makes me gasp and nearly choke. She's not touching me with anything else now, and alternately strokes and strikes me with it, but in a completely random not-pattern that I can't quite grasp the math on. She's whispering to me, soothing words on warm breath into my ear. "Shh, Tony. Shh..."

Before, I loved being at the mercy of a beautiful woman. Now it's all tangled up in the memory of scary, swearing men beating me so I'd make weapons for them. I'm wondering if she's getting insulted that I'm still not hard, although by rights I should be. This stuff used to work, but it's just not anymore. I'm too damn jittery, and the words meant to be calming are in fact having the opposite effect. I'm straining against the cuffs again, drenched in cold sweat, biting the ball. "Shh," she says. "Easy..." And I'm _trying_, it's not like I'm ready to safeword, but pulling myself together is tough, even with her tongue in my ear and her hand in my hair.

I hear her rummage around in the drawer again, and she makes a glad hum. A couple of seconds later, I discover that she found the vampire gloves as hundreds of little pins scrape over the welts from the crop. Several circuits in my brain blow, and my thoughts are babbling, _yes_ and _no_ and _holyfuckingshit_, and the pleasure and pain have become so entwined that I don't know which is which anymore. I'm hissing around the gag and blood is flowing in tiny rivulets down my sides and ribs and legs, so oversensitized that I can feel each individual pinprick, breath coming in short sharp gasps through my nose, which isn't enough, and oxygen deprivation is making me a little dizzy.

I'm still not hard. Dammit.

She stops, finally, and my chest and thighs and abdomen burn. Stilettoed footsteps on the carpet, water running in the bathroom sink. She comes back and straddles my knees.

The warm washcloth on the welts and scrapes is a relief. She starts at my thighs and works her way slowly, almost agonizingly, upwards. She follows the cloth with her tongue, the smoother, slicker texture of that making a pleasing counterpoint to the roughness of the cloth. She cups my balls, rolling them between skilled fingers before moving upwards to my cock, and damn if she doesn't have a really talented tongue. The shaft finally twitches a response, and I can feel her smile against it...

...and then she moves upwards again. I whine a protest and jerk my pelvis. "Shh," she purrs, and seats herself across my hips, sliding her cleft up and down my cock, which has gone about half-hard. "All in good time. Have some patience, Tony." Her tongue follows the cloth up my body, across my chest, throat, and then my face. She'd brought a glass of hot water in from the bathroom, and replenishes the dampness of the cloth from it from time to time.

The blindfold comes off with a flourish. She's beautiful--cheeks flushed, hair a wild golden halo around her face and shoulders, magnificent breasts heaving. Her pupils are dilated in the glow of the arc reactor, her expression triumphant. She dips the washcloth into the water before bathing my eyes, which I close, because this is so good and so soothing--

Right up until the wet cloth drops across my nose and mouth. My eyes snap open

Her expression has morphed from aroused and coquettish to clinical and implacable. Where did that video camera on the periphery of my vision come from? The red LED glows at me like Satan's own eyeball and I remember another camera, in a cave, an angry voice reading a statement.

The cloth...the cloth is _soaking wet_, and I seriously can't _breathe at all_, because there's water draining into my _nose_, and who the hell thought this was a good idea? "Pepper," I try to say around the gag and through the water, because it's too much, and it's not pleasure anymore (if it ever was), now it's fear and flashback and suddenly it's them not her and ohholyfuckno this is bad this is really really bad I'm going to die this time and all I can do is scream "pepperpepperpepperpepper" but it's not coming through the gag and more water dribbles onto the cloth and up my nose from the glass in her hand and even Pepper, who manages to save me from myself on a daily if not hourly basis, can't save me from this.

My brain is firing random neurons and I'm thrashing against the restraints and my heart feels like it's going to rupture out of my ribcage, right through the arc reactor, in a messy and spectacular explosion. And her hand is on my _chest_, too close too damn close oh Jesus God what's she doing now, she's _touching the reactor_, all it would take would be a slight turn and not even a hard pull--

That tips me over the edge, and I black out.

:x:

When I wake up, she's gone, along with the washcloth over my face, but the blindfold is back, and I'm still fastened to the bed. Breathing is a mental issue rather than a physical one but still an issue, and my heart still wants to burst from my body and gallop away like an unbroken horse.

"Miss Potts is on her way, sir," Jarvis tells me. This does and doesn't make me feel better.

Later, I'm not sure how much later because time has become fluid and inconstant, I hear Pepper's step on the carpet, and the bed dips under her weight. Gentle hands take the blindfold and gag off. "Where are the keys?" she asks, and I don't actually _know_ and I'm beyond coherent speech right now anyway. All I can do is shake my head.

At least the silk ropes around my ankles don't require a key, and she unties them with minimal fuss. I curl around myself as much as possible with my wrists still cuffed to the headboard. "Jarvis?" she says softly.

"Top drawer," he answers, and my hands are free and I pull them against my body and lie there, shaking, trying to remember what normal breathing feels like. I'm pretty sure it's not supposed to feel like this.

"Shh," she says, which is the exact wrong thing, because that's what the other girl kept saying. My arms cover my head, on autopilot, the breath catches in my chest, and I can't even form words. She makes a little noise in her throat. "Come on, Tony, let's get you out of here and into your own bed."

I'm not sure I can walk, I'm just that shaky, and it takes me a couple of tries to get my knees to hold me up. With a hand barely touching my elbow, Pepper steers me to the room I sleep in, the room I don't ever take anyone else into, and she peels back the covers on the king-sized bed. I collapse into it, and she tucks the blanket around my shoulders, smoothing it over my arms. "Will that be all, Mr.--"

"Stay," I rasp.

She stops, and turns, and looks at me, and her expression has me slamming my eyes shut. "Tony, it's one thirty in the--"

"Please." This isn't a word I use often (ever), and it's not fair that I use it now on her, but I need her more than she knows, more than I can ever let her know. The tremors haven't stopped, might never stop, but they're easier to bear with her in the room.

She sighs, and I don't have to be able to see her to know she's half-rolling her eyes and her lips are tight and she's pitying me, which is almost more than I can stand (again). I nearly tell her to just go ahead and go, I'll see her in the morning. But before I can say "That will be all, Miss Potts," the chair scrapes across the rug and stops next to the head of the bed, and she sits down, and I hear her shoes hit the floor one at a time. "Go to sleep, Tony."

My chest unclenches, and I can breathe again. The quest for "normal" has ended in disaster, as it was bound to do, because nothing is normal anymore and probably won't be again, for a given value of "normal." We'll just have to redefine that given value, I guess. But _Pepper_...she's my constant, my North Star to navigate by. _She's_ normal, as necessary to me as...well, air. I know this to the marrow of my bones, know it more than I know pi to a hundred places--know it just like I know that if I tell her, she'd run screaming into the night at the rawness of my need. So I keep my mouth shut, as much of a chore as that is, and bask in the fact that she came even though she has no idea what it means to me that she did.

I haven't been sleeping well since I got home, plagued by nightmares and spending my nights more often than not in the shop. Maybe with her here, I think before dropping off, the bad dreams will stay away.

...Or not. I wake up in a freezing sweat with a scream ripping from my throat, sitting straight up in the bed, panting through teeth that are clenched so hard I'm in danger of breaking my jaw.

"Jarvis...? Where's...where's Pepper?" I ask between gasps, because the only thing left of her in the room is the faint lingering scent of her shampoo. The clock reads 2:47.

"She slipped out eighteen minutes ago. You were slumbering quite soundly."

"Mmph." I rake my hand through my hair and scrub at my face for a few seconds, drooping because her leaving has left a far bigger hole than it should have. Then I get up, throw some clothes on, and stumble down to the shop. I'm going to drink as much scotch as humanly possible and do what I can to grind out the flaws still haunting the Mark II armor.

I won't be sleeping any more tonight.

:x:

_Obadiah pays the girl, sends her on her way, and settles in with a warm cognac to watch the video of her skilled handiwork. He's hard almost before it starts, and he grunts in satisfaction and comes with a few lazy strokes on his cock as it finishes. The server on the ghost drive files the raw vid away in the same directory as the one from those incompetents in the Ten Rings. That one won't ever see the light of day, but this..._

_Properly edited, and placed on YouTube? The fallout in bad PR and stock prices will be _spectacular_. Getting the Board to agree to an injunction after this goes public, he thinks, will be a piece of cake._


	2. Pepper

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Takes off in the middle of the scene, Pepper's POV. Because I can't help myself.

**Title:** Seeking Normal  
**Author:** babies stole my dingo (agilebrit)  
**Fandom:** Iron Man (movieverse)  
**Rating:** NC-17, overall. PG-13, this part, I think.  
**Length:** Short story (this part, about 1200 words; 3700 overall)  
**Disclaimer:** Marvel owns, just playing, so not mine and no way am I making money from this.  
**Feedback:** Concrit adored! If you see something that can be improved upon, please let me know, even if it's only a typo.  
**Written for:** My own sadistic pleasure, if you can call it that--sparked by a discussion [here](http://community.livejournal.com/pressure_suit/767.html) that sent my brain spiraling out of control. pensive1, sunnyd_lite, and quite a few others on my flist and elsewhere aided and abetted me through it.  
**Warnings:** None for this part, other than standard angst, trauma, and Hurt with very little Comfort.  
**Summary:** Tony tries for normalcy again, two weeks after getting home from Afghanistan. It...doesn't work. At all. This scene takes off from the midpoint of the first part, Pepper's POV. She gets a call...  


* * *

The ringing phone jerks me out of a sound sleep. I look at the clock and moan; only one person would be calling me at this hour. "Tony, what--" I start muzzily.

"Miss Potts, you'd better come." That's not the voice I expected, and suddenly I'm wide awake.

"Jarvis? What's wrong?" An icy tendril of fear coils up in my stomach.

I could swear that the AI hesitates. "He is fastened to the bed and, from my readings of his vital signs, in a very agitated state."

"Fastened to the..." _Two weeks,_ I think. _That didn't take long._ "I'm on my way."

I throw my slacks and a blouse on and grab the first pair of shoes that comes to hand, the black Manolos with the four-inch heels and the open sides. Jarvis sounds uncharacteristically disturbed, and I break several traffic laws on my way to Tony's house.

I've uncuffed him from the bed before, of course. Usually he has cheeky commentary and a cheekier grin, and he has the grace to send me a bouquet of daisies or a box of See's chocolate or something for putting up with that afterwards. I don't make any remarks, because it's not my place, and we don't discuss his...proclivities.

This time...

I stop short in the doorway of the bedroom he reserves for activities like this, and my hand goes involuntarily to my mouth. No wonder Jarvis was concerned. Tony's wrists are handcuffed to the headboard, his ankles are tied with...are those silk ropes? Whatever they are, he's tied to the footboard with them, and he's gagged and blindfolded and covered in scrapes and red welts. He's been bleeding, although it's mostly dried. I hate it when he uses the damn vampire gloves.

This is nothing new.

What's new is the fact that he's sweating and shaking and breathing way faster than can possibly be good for him. The glow of the arc reactor throws everything into harsh relief, and I don't need Jarvis to turn the lights up because I can see all I need to. More than I want to.

My professionalism wars with my concern. I want nothing more than to gather him in my arms and kiss his hair and tell him it's going to be all right, even though that would clearly be a gigantic lie and I'm a terrible liar. But we've never had that sort of relationship--I hadn't even hugged him, for Heaven's sake, when he'd come back from Afghanistan.

So I sit on the edge of the bed and gently remove the gag and the blindfold, and his eyes are wide and terrified and my heart cracks out of my chest to see him this way. "Where are the keys?" I ask, but he's not up to talking yet, so I untie the ropes from his ankles. He half-rolls onto his side and curls around himself as much as he can. "Jarvis?"

"Top drawer," Jarvis says promptly, and I find them right there and unlock the cuffs. Tony pulls his arms into his chest and closes his eyes, and his breathing gradually eases but is far from normal. My breathing isn't normal either, and there's an uncomfortable tremor in the core of my chest.

My hand reaches out, seemingly of its own accord, for his hair, but I pull it back. "Shh," I say, and he hunches in tighter on himself and covers his head, as if someone just kicked him. I flinch, myself, and make a noise in my throat, but I have to get him up before we both fall apart. Before he falls apart more. "Come on, Tony, let's get you out of here and into your own bed."

It's a couple of tries before he visibly pulls himself together enough to get up. He's completely naked--who knows where his clothes are--and I carefully keep my eyes above chest level. I take him by the elbow with two fingers and lead him to the room he sleeps in, the room no one else is allowed to enter without express permission, and pull the covers back to let him collapse onto the sheets. Tucking the blanket around his shoulders and (again) refraining from stroking his hair before turning to go, I say, "Will that be all, Mr.--"

He doesn't let me finish. "Stay." His voice is raspy, exhausted. I wonder what he's just been through and decide I don't want to know the particulars.

I stop and look at him, and he squeezes his eyes shut. I'm trying to be reasonable, and failing, because I don't actually want to leave him like this, but don't feel it's my _place_ to stay. "Tony, it's one thirty in the--"

"Please." And that's a word that never, ever comes out of his mouth, and it lets me know just how far off the end of his rope he's fallen tonight. Maybe he brought this on himself, and maybe it's one more insane mess I'm cleaning up after, but I'm damned if I can just abandon him here--his expression is equal parts lost, bewildered, and wrecked, and I can feel it mirrored on my own face...which, thankfully, is in shadow, so he wouldn't see it even if his eyes were open.

So I sigh to cover my own devastation and drag the chair up beside the bed. I take my shoes off, drop them on the floor, and tuck my feet under me, and, once again, don't stroke his hair and don't kiss him better and don't hug him, because that's not the kind of relationship we have. I settle for "Go to sleep, Tony."

He doesn't say anything more, and eventually his breathing approaches normal, and I can tell he's finally dropped off, so my breathing can go back to normal too. I sit with him awhile, long enough to figure he's down for the count, and then pick my shoes up and head home.

But before I do, I put my hand on his hair, very softly, and blow a shaky breath out. "Oh, Tony."

xXx

I pull into the driveway the next morning at seven to find a pile of burnt embers off to one side of it, still smoldering. I recognize the outlines of the bedside table from his "fun room," and my lips tighten.

But there's a huge bouquet of three dozen long-stemmed blue roses and a pair of Louboutins from next season and the biggest box of Godiva chocolate I've ever seen on the table I work from in the living room.

And when I take him his espresso at eight thirty and give him his first stack of papers to sign, neither of us says a word.

end


End file.
